Principal topic: The Self
Carl Helrich
Paul Meyer Reimer
Life is not an easy topic to define. Sentient life (living beings that think) is even less easy. The concept of self is inherent in any discussions of sentient life. Indeed, to some degree, these are one and the same.
Are sentient beings a natural consequence of the universe? A part of this is certainly the question of the origin of consciousness. Theologically we believe that God is a part of what consciousness means and what consciousness is. But what are the connections?
- The Jewish scripture makes the claim that God created humans to care for the earth and to till the soil.
- The poet, Weldon Johnson, says that God created human beings because God was lonely. Is our existence tied to God's loneliness?
- The New Testament claims that all of creation groans for a completion of the creation process in the creation of new women and men who are true daughters and sons of God.
The Lutheran Theologian, Phil Hefner, contends that humans are co-creators with God. Is this what it means to be made in the image of God? Are we creative because we bear the imprint of God? Certainly we cannot be creative without the ability to comprehend ourselves as selves.
Some 40,000 years ago we began to bury our dead. To bury the body of a loved one who has died reveals a connection to something beyond self, but is also a strong affirmation of the concept of self.
With Descartes came the concept of the self as separate from the body. That is, the self is that which thinks. This is separate, in Descartes' philosophy, from that which is simply matter. Cogito ergo sum! I think, therefore I am. The true self was not the body and the person we observe in the mirror. The self was separate from that. The self could live on even though the body died.
But nowadays, we know how brain injury can destroy or damage the self. So it seems much more likely that the self is tied to the body, and to the brain.
Though an occasional AI researcher claims otherwise, we do not yet recognize a brain that exists separately from a body. What defines a sentient brain? We elevate the "rational" ability of brains, and often neglect "emotion" as more animalian. Yet Antonio Damasio has shown rather convincingly that when emotion is damaged, thought processes are as well. And Daniel Kahnemann, among others, have pointed out the importance of our subconscious, despite our dim awareness of it.
We think in part with our brain. This has led people to increasinly sophisticated attempts at constructing artificial intelligence, and this has been a fruitful way to explore what it means to "think". Is the physical brain just hardware, and different "software" (within limits) can run on top of this? This is the idea behind what is called the strong artificial intelligence (AI). All we really need is the brain in a vat to run the software. The rest of the body is there for mobility and nutrition? But "embodied AI" reflects on how a robot might learn better if there are other parts of the body like arms and legs. And a face. Look for COG and KISMET on the web. Anne Foerst is a theologian who has been associated with MIT's AI laboratory looking at the implications this has for our understanding of ourselves.
John Polkinghorne, a theoretical physicist and later in life an Anglican priest, has asked what is it that is immortal if we are embodied? That is, if "physicalism" (that our sentience is intimately bound up with having a body) is a correct picture, what is the consequence for the concept of a life after death? What is it that God has chosen to pass beyond our death. Polkinghorne suggests that this is the remembrance that God has of us. Is this what is truly self? Do we have a awareness of self because God is aware of us? Is it our relationship to God that constitutes what we call self. Is that increased in relationship to God and diminished as we diminish our relationship to God? Is this what we call soul? Is this what might even be immortal?
But the brain cannot be neglected. It is simply so that with the development of the central nervous system has come our ability to realize self. And we are not the only species with this hardware. It is fruitful but difficult to investigate consciousness among other animals. For anyone who has lived with an animal it is difficult to believe that the animal is not self-aware. But to convince another, who is skeptical, is a very difficult task. The 'mirror test' has been used to demonstrate at least one kind of self-awareness in animals. And primatologist Frans de Waal has found some evidence of morality among primates that might be a foundation for what we consider to be moral.
If sentience exists in a continuum within much of life then it may be tied to biological development. The Jesuit paleontologist, Father Teilhard de Chardin concluded that the earth was a system and that the cell did not evolve at one point on the system, but was a solution that appeared globally. The same is true of consciousness. Teilhard's idea rooted in biological observations but expressed in the language of faith, was that we are moving toward a deeper unity with God through the cosmic Christ. This is what he called the Omega point. But we are not moving there because God is finagling the whole cosmos (no Intelligent Design), but rather all of creation, including humans, is involved and contributing to this progression.
Some theologicial tradition recognize that God is revealed not only in the "little" book of Scripture (the Bible), but also in the "big" book of Nature. John Haught, a student of Teilhard and a Catholic theologian, also immersed himself in biology. Unlike those who have seen evolution as a challenge to belief in God, Haught instead asked what the process and operation of evolution could tell us about the nature of God.
If we concentrate on the human brain we can accept the fact of sentience and we may be able even to neglect its source. Let us imagine that the brain is some sort of dynamical system made up of neurons, about which we know something as scientists. Neurons carry electrical signals through the transport across the nerve membrane of ionic currents. A nerve is excited and sodium and potassium channels open and later close producing an electrical pulse reaches the end of the axon. There calcium is released providing for the fusion of synaptic vesicles with the presynaptic membrane. These vesicles release the neurotransmitter, which then activates the dendrite of the next nerve. The chatter of electrical pulses results. A brain state may be thought of as a dynamical state represented by a set of currents, voltages, and the pulses down the axons. Good. But how are we conscious of that? How does that physical state result in awareness and self-consciousness? That is the physical side of the mind-brain problem.
But there is a tremendous gap between what we call the physical side and an answer to the question of consciousness. Even if we understood all the details of the physiology and the biophysics, we would not be able to connect that to our experience as sentient beings. Paul Tillich said that God is the "ground of being". Being is more than just the physical, it is also life and all in which we participate. As scientists and mathematicians we cannot point simply to the problems of biology and say, "God did it." That, many of us believe is true, but to say this answers no question.
We have, throughout our history and before that tried to explain things by introducing concepts which are often as ill-defined as the things we are trying to explain. A new term called complexity has emerged in our attempts to come to grips with the mind/brain problem. Complexity has roots in the very legitimate physics of nonlinear dynamics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and chaos theory. Our efforts in the neurosciences have shown a dramatic cross-disciplinary approach. And through all of this we speak in terms of complex systems and even use the terms complexity and complexification, which can loosely be defined as nature's propensity to become more complex.
We point to the emergence of self consciousness as a result of nature's "complexification" and speak of the idea that we are self aware as the result of the extreme complexity of the human brain. That is to say, given a complex enough system, self-awareness will emerge. Perhaps it is true that we are self-aware as a natural scientific consequence of the fact that we are complex nonlinear systems. But other complex system -- for example the complicated, interconnected, non-linear network of organisms in a forest -- are not typically recognized as conscious. So we yearn for a more connected explanation.
While referring to God as the "ground of being" Tillich seems to imply that life and God are the same thing, but that life is an aspect of being.
In T life is an aspe No one should try to define life as God. That is as false an idea as Pantheism. Of course if you cross the boundary into the region in which the presence of God is related to the fact that there is life, then you have identified yourself with theists rather than atheists. You have at least decided that God is the presence in the universe that makes what we have possible. You have realized that all you say on this question of self-awareness has a theological position behind it.
But Tillich's ideas are not trivial.
When Paul Tillich referred to God as the "ground of being", perhaps we can take this in a similar sense to "complexity". In this case we may have faith that God is intimately involved in the world, and in life, but we may not be able to fill in all the details. Tillich claims that God is mystery. God is not a problem to be solved. Puzzles and problems can be solved. But God is mystery and mystery cannot, by its very nature, be solved.
In this sense, Tillich's thought is related to "mysticism" or "Apophatic" or negative theology, which attempts to get closer to God by thinking about what God is not. So we may encounter truth in these approaches. But we do not encounter a simple answer to the question posed.
Tillich also realizes, the importance of a realm beyond the self: The wider society and of the idea of community to the concept of being and, by inference, to the concept of God. God is not the community.
The Mennonite confession that the spirit of God is present in the body assembled does not define God as the Church. But we do have the realization that life may not exist at all without the community. Here we must be careful that we not trivialize any of this. It is highly probably that life did not emerge at one isolated point of the earth and spread (Teilhard above). That is, it seems probable that no single clump of molecules began to exhibit the rudiments of what we call life. On the basis of theoretical physics we know
that the directionality of time itself is related to the interactions among systems and that time cannot be defined in isolation. At least time with a directionality cannot be comprehended in isolation. We even know, related to this, that the fundamental entity for discussion in this context is not the individual particle with a defined trajectory. Quantum mechanics suggests that a much more abstract probability field is propagating, and a particle is just a manifestation of our attempts to interrogate the field.
In the last years of the twentieth century we worked very hard at trying to establish an understanding of the human genome. In naive terms this was the ultimate in our understanding of the human being. But lying behind that belief is the postulate that there is a completely deterministic connection between DNA and the results we observe in human beings. But more recently, we have found that there is another realm of "epigenetics" controlling when and how DNA is expressed in proteins.
Quantum theory is another branch of science that may well have a bearing on the questions here. Folks who have thought about connections between this theory and how we think about God include
- John Polkinghorne,
- William Pollard, like Polkinghorned he was a physicist and an ordained Episcopal priest.
- Bob Russell (CTNS)
Were it not for free will we would be only puppets with something or someone else pulling the strings. If the universe is interconnected as Laplace believed, then all of our thoughts and actions would be the result of initial conditions imposed on the universe. All God would need to do, after setting up the laws by which all things were to run, is sit back and watch the game play out. Our thoughts would then not be our own and all or our actions would be determined by those initial conditions.
But between chaos theory and quantum indeterminacy there seems to be no room for a completely deterministic universe anymore. Are we then randomly determined? If randomly determined, are we willing to give up on human's responsibility or possibility to choose or play any role in the development of the world?
With human freedom comes the possibility of evil. Is there really such a thing as evil at all? That is a question which seems to have no answer other than a philosophical stance on the situation. The problem of theodicy is to reconcile perceived evil with the concept of a loving God.
Even if we agree that there is no such thing as natural evil, we still have manufactured our solution in terms of the existence of free human beings. But if we accept that God created humans, and pronounced them good, then the problem again surfaces. If God is truly present at each birth, and if we are each considered to be precious in God's sight, how do we legitimize the idea that God has chosen certain peole, or has allowed certain people, to become the sources of evil? Why was Hitler born? No answer has yet been found.
Paul Tillich was a chaplain in the German army in World War I. German chaplains were in the trenches with the troops and came under fire. Tillich received the iron cross for bravery, not for theological ideas. He has claimed that one night in the trenches in France he became an existentialist as he saw the results of a disastrous engagement. To a man most of his friends among the officers were mutilated or dead. How can we confront this reality and believe in the God of the drawing room or the Sunday school?
The problem of theodicy is not simply an interesting idea, it is profoundly real and must be encountered whenever we try to understand human beings. In the Goshen conference of 2005, Bob Russell took on the question of natural evil. And the bulk of the conference discussions were of natural evil. Steve Crain pointed out that it is the suffering that is redeemed. But the suffering does not go away. Is this part of our renewal in the Christian New Creation? We do not escape suffering. Our life is not suddenly full of only happiness and success. Perhaps the Christian walk is a walk of new understanding that comes from deeper communion with God. Perhaps we must still suffer with the rest of humanity. But perhaps we shall suffer with God.
So we, at the very least, confront the beginnings of the greatest of all scientific problems when we ask about self-awareness and consciousness. The task before us is theological in its very nature. But it is also a problem of theoretical physics, it is a problem of philosophy, it is a problem of mathematics, and it is a problem of biology. It is a problem that cannot be undertaken without considering civilization, history, and communities as well. There are no answers that will satisfy all. There are probably no answers that will satisfy any of us. As Tillich said, we can seek answers to problems. But this is, we may expect, a mystery, and not a problem at all. But that does not stop us from investigating.
So now we take another step in the adventure. We shall come out of this with no good understanding of answers. But, as scientists we must realize that we will die without having found many answers to the questions before us.
Thought-provoking items from recent years
To what degree are humans--H. Sapiens--unique?
The roots of our species are in the animal kingdom. There is evidence that H. Sapiens may have interbred with Neanderthals and possibly Denisovans.
Joshua Moritz takes seriously the existence of sociality and language in several primates, and not only humans. He locates our species' uniqueness in God's choice of humans for a particular purpose.
Anthropologist Frans de Waal finds likely precedents to human morality in experiments which show the existence of a sense of fairness among monkeys.
What is the nature of empathy?
A Science study showed that rats will free other trapped rats in preference, even, over chocolate.
What's the connection between rationality and ethics?
Steven Pinker argues that "We are getting smarter, and as a result, the world is becoming a more peaceful place".
And how "rational" is human rationality anyway?
Richard Thaler delighted in collecting examples of human irrationality. Experiments he performed and the "Nudge" theory he developed to harness these effects earned him the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Thaler's idols (and eventual mentors) were Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Their work challenged the economic theory of the rational individual with experiments that suggested humans have a set of a subconscious, but rapid and effortless ways to reach decisions ("System 1") and a much slower, hard to mobilize, ability to use logic ("System 2"). In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman laid out the System 1 heuristics as 'biases' and explored the nature of happiness, distinguishing between the experiencing self and the remembering self (supported by experiments in which colonoscopies were manipulated!)
Leading up to the four years of the Trump administration, and the period of covid, issues related to science and misinformation raised their heads. How do people acquire beliefs about scientific issues such as climate change, vaccines, evolution, or the trustworthiness of elections? It is commonly believed that beliefs about such matters depend on one's scientific or numerical literacy. Skeptics of this idea: Katharine Hayhoe thinks there have to be shared values for productive conversations. Dan Kahan points out that science literacy can just make people more adept at rationalizing their favorite beliefs, but scientific curiousity cuts the other way.
Maybe cooperation is what really makes humans unique. Sverker Johanssen puts it this way: "Yes, we fight. ...[But put] 300 people in an airplane and they will sit quietly enough across the Atlantic. Put 300 chimps in the same place. What will happen?".
Cooperation between individuals who are not related by kinship ties is a challenge to both capitalism as modelled by economists' selfish actors and Richard Dawkin's view of the role of the "selfish gene" in evolution. There is strong, empirical evidence for a peculiar kind of altruism--altruistic punishment--across many cultures.
Human cooperation has taken on a particular urgency with the climate crisis. In 1968, Garret Hardin wrote about the "tragedy of the commons", when individual incentives do not line up with collective needs. And yet, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize for her work on the circumstances that cause all kinds of human groups to successfully manage "shared resource pools".